While it’s clear Big Ten and SEC teams are going to fill the majority of slots in the first 12-team College Football Playoff, confusion persists about how the rest of the expanded postseason bracket will be completed.

As a refresher, the final CFP field, which will be announced Sunday, will include:

• The five highest ranked conference champions: First-round byes go to the four highest ranked league winners.
• The next seven highest ranked teams: Seeds 5–8 will host first-round games against Nos. 9–12.

With four teams each from the Big Ten and SEC in the top 11, it’s looking like conference title games in the ACC (No. 17 Clemson–No. 8 SMU), Big 12 (No. 16 Iowa State–No. 15 Arizona State), and Mountain West (No. 20 UNLV–No. 10 Boise State) could be de facto Playoff games themselves, with the winners earning automatic CFP bids, and the losers potentially missing out entirely. All three games should be close ones, as sportsbooks have handicapped them all under one score.

SMU is the highest ranked of those six teams at No. 8, but CFP committee chairman Warde Manuel said Tuesday night that the Mustangs could fall below No. 11 Alabama in the rankings with a loss against Clemson. “Potentially, yes,” he said. “And they can move above teams, as well. Again, it just depends on the outcome of the game.”

That unique format of the 12-team CFP is creating wild scenarios, like Boise State being in a position to potentially earn the No. 3 seed with a win and SMU loss, or miss out on the CFP altogether if it loses to UNLV.

Amid the rankings debates, college athletic directors and coaches have taken to social media to plead their cases—and argue about where their programs should fall.

The WNBA may have accidentally leaked the team name of the expansion franchise based in Toronto that is set to debut in 2026.

On Tuesday night, X users began sharing screenshots of a drop-down list of team names found on WNBA.com. The list showed 14 WNBA teams—one more than the number of teams playing next season—and included the “Toronto Tempo.”

Winsidr senior writer Myles Ehrlich confirmed to Front Office Sports he saw the list himself and shared his screenshot on X at 10:08 p.m. ET. 

It’s unclear when the official announcement of Toronto’s team name will be—or whether the Tempo is the final moniker of the franchise. X, Instagram, and TikTok accounts for the Toronto franchise go by the handle @WNBA_Toronto.

The WNBA did not respond to a request for comment.

The timing is premature, at least compared to the Golden State Valkyries, the WNBA’s latest expansion team set to debut in 2025. The Valkyries announced their team name on May 14, the opening day of the 2024 WNBA season.

The Toronto expansion franchise was first announced in May, a week after the Valkyries launched their team name. It will be the league’s first team outside the U.S. The franchise is owned by Kilmer Sports Ventures CEO Larry Tanenbaum, who is also the chairman of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, which owns the NBA’s Raptors, NHL’s Maple Leafs, and MLS’s Toronto FC.

Tanenbaum reportedly paid $115 million for the team, split between the expansion fee and a new practice facility.

While much of the media industry continues to splinter and shrink, ESPN is getting a major boost in the streaming realm.

Beginning Wednesday, content from the sports media giant will have its own featured tile on sister corporate entity Disney+. Long planned by the company, ESPN+ programming will be featured alongside other core Disney general entertainment properties including Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars.

The move also puts ESPN content in front of tens of millions of additional subscribers on one of the world’s largest streaming services. While not at the scale of Netflix, Disney+ held 122.7 million global subscribers as of Sept. 28—the end of Disney’s fiscal fourth quarter—nearly five times the 25.6 million for ESPN+. That larger group within Disney+ also likely includes many non-avid sports fans, and in turn a growth opportunity for ESPN and Disney.

“This launch is really going to reshape what Disney+ is, who it’s for, and what we have to offer. But it also marks the next step in streaming for the future of ESPN,” said Disney+ president Alisa Bowen.

Always Be Closing

There’s also a clear upsell motive in the ESPN tile strategy, as subscribers to the Disney streaming bundle of Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu will have a deep breadth of ESPN+ content available from Disney+. Subscribers to Disney+ alone, however, will only receive a small portion of ESPN+ material, and the rest will redirect toward pages for package upgrades.

Those limited offerings for non-bundle subscribers, however, lean in part toward sports-related animated programming such as the Dec. 9 Monday Night Football integration with The Simpsons and the Mickey Mouse–themed “Dunk the Halls” effort for an NBA game on Christmas Day.

“Part of the design is to try to stimulate engagement and interest in sports to a casual fan that might not otherwise come to ESPN in their normal media behaviors,” said John Lasker, ESPN+ SVP. “So it’s not creating an alternative to ESPN or ESPN+, but more of an extended reach opportunity.”

Disney+ implemented a similar tile for Hulu back in March.

Flagship Learnings

The ESPN tile on Disney+, meanwhile, precedes by roughly eight months the anticipated debut of the direct-to-consumer version of ESPN, widely termed as Flagship. There’s been no shortage of hype surrounding that project, with Disney CEO Bob Iger recently saying it will be “the best product the consumer has ever seen in sports,” and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro describing it as a distillation of all the network’s various offerings and capabilities.

The heightened integration with Disney+ will likely aid in that development effort by supplying additional data about user consumption patterns, particularly those who are not ardent sports fans.

“We’re very excited to figure out what the increased audience opportunity is here, which we believe is pretty great,” Lasker said. “This will teach us a lot.”